Ultimate Links PC Tips

5 years of Gmail

2009-04-05T18:25:00.000-07:00

It was five years ago yesterday that Gmail launched by giving out a gig. Back then, a typical webmail account could only store about five megabytes of mail. It's hard to remember what those days were like, considering that today, you can send a single 20 megabyte attachment, four times the size of an entire webmail account from 2004. A gigabyte of online storage may have been what got a lot of people to give Gmail a try, but changes to the email experience — like search, labels, conversation view, and strong spam protection — seem to be what kept people around.

The engineers who created Gmail were frustrated with the existing email solutions, and wanted to build a better tool for people who got a lot of mail, which meant rethinking everything from the ground up. They built an architecture that was a combination of HTML and JavaScript (this later became known as AJAX), which offered a smoother, faster interface. And they designed Gmail with the most demanding users in mind — Googlers who got hundreds of messages each day and power users with broadband connections, back when 56k modems were still the norm.

The last 5 years have brought about a lot of change, and Gmail is now more than just mail. We added chat, and then video chat. We've invested in under-the-hood changes that allow for the rapid development that's been happening lately in Gmail Labs — 43 experimental features in 43 weeks including tasks, offline, undo send, and even some silly stuff. What started as internal email for Google employees is now used by more than a million companies and tens of millions of people in 52 languages. And one gigabyte doesn't feel like very much space anymore.

Today's email problems are different than the problems people had five years ago, and Gmail's most demanding users continue to push it to its limits. We're getting more mail and communicating in more ways than ever before. Web browsers are getting faster and offering functionality that people could only dream of in 2004. We expect the changes over the next five years to be even more radical than those of the past five. We're already getting excited about some new stuff we're testing internally, and we'll keep you updated on our progress on the Gmail Blog.
Announced by Todd Jackson, Gmail Product Manager

Translate between 41 languages with Google Translate

2009-03-05T18:41:00.001-08:00

Google Translate recently added Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese, and Galician to the mix. The rollout of these seven additional languages marks a new milestone: automatic translations between 41 languages (1,640 language pairs!). This means we can now translate between languages read by 98% of Internet users.

In just a few years, the machine translation group within Google Research has taken its initial research system from two languages to 41 languages and is now handling millions of translation requests a day. For several languages, Google Translate is the first freely available machine translation system for these languages. Of course, there's always room for improvement, and we're working hard to improve translation quality. Our statistical models are built from vast quantities of monolingual and translated texts using automated machine learning techniques.

It's exciting and satisfying to work on a product that can help people access content they may otherwise be unable to understand. We've heard stories of people using Google Translate to help them do business internationally, and we've seen many websites (e.g., New York's Metro Transit Authority) and blogs add the Google Translate My Page Gadget to their pages to make their content more accessible to people from all over the world.

Whenever I personally travel, I do lots of research on the web to figure out what to see and do, and where to stay and eat. With Translate, I'm able to use the cross-language search feature to find and access the latest info (e.g., restaurant recommendations, most recent trains/bus schedules, special events, etc.), which is often only available in the local language.

More importantly, Translate provides people who may not otherwise have a lot of web content available in their own language with access to the wealth of content on the truly worldwide web.

Announced by Jeff Chin, Product Manager

My Maps, your love stories

2009-02-16T18:54:00.000-08:00

Flowers, chocolates and cards are all typically associated with Valentine's Day. But as someone with a bit of a crush on cartography, I wanted to find a way for people to express their love using maps. I rallied a few other hopeless romantics around here and, together, we created a My Map where you can mark the romantic places in your life. Whether it's the waterfall where you proposed, the Chinese restaurant where you had your first date with your sweetheart, the secluded beach where you got married, or simply the most romantic spot that comes to mind, we'd love to hear from you. You can even add photos and videos to illustrate your love story. (But make sure your story doesn't make Cupid blush, as this map is intended for all audiences.)

View Larger Map

And if you're still scrambling for a last-minute gift for your valentine this year, we hope this map will provide some inspiration. You can use My Maps or the new Touring feature in Google Earth to make a special map just for your loved one, showing all the important places throughout your relationship. Of course, some flowers probably wouldn't hurt either. :-)

Announced by Elaine Filadelfo, Google Blog team and self-professed map lover

Happy trails with My Tracks for Android-powered phones

2009-02-12T18:48:00.000-08:00

Today I'm pleased to announce the new My Tracks application for Android-powered phones such as the T-Mobile G1. My Tracks records tracks of outdoor activities using the phone's built-in GPS. It shows these tracks on a map and presents live statistics, including an elevation profile. And here's the best part: it lets you easily share your activities with friends and the world using Google Maps, as well as archive your training history with Google Docs.

Check out a ride from one of the My Tracks engineers (click to view larger):

My Tracks was developed as a 20% project. On behalf of the entire team, we hope you enjoy using this application as much as we had fun developing it. And we're looking forward to seeing all of the creative ways people use it.

Announced by Dylan Casey, Product Manager and former professional cyclist

Calendar and contact syncing for iPhone and Windows Mobile devices

2009-02-11T08:00:00.000-08:00

One advantage of storing information online is being able to access it from anywhere, on any device. Last year we released a tool for Blackberry devices to sync Google Calendar and Gmail contacts with the pre-installed calendar and contacts applications. Today, we're offering more people easy access to their information on the go with two-way calendar and contacts sync for iPhones and Windows Mobile devices, and two-way contacts sync for mobile devices that support SyncML. This will be a particularly handy improvement for people who regularly use Google tools, like corporate employees, university students, and busy families.

For iPhone and Windows Mobile devices, Google Sync allows you to get your Gmail contacts and Google Calendar events onto your phone. Sync uses push technology, which means that any changes you make to your calendar or contacts from the browser or phone will be reflected on your device within minutes. For phones that support SyncML, the tool will allow you to get your Gmail contacts onto your phone. For all of these devices, synchronization happens automatically over the air, without having to manually sync your phone. The connection is always on, which means your information is always up-to-date, no matter where you are or what you're doing.

Getting started is easy. You can configure Google Sync directly from your device. The instructions and capabilities vary for different phones, so check out our Help Center for device-specific information. If you're a Google Apps user, Google Sync must be enabled for your domain by your administrator.

Following our credo to launch early and iterate, we're introducing Google Sync in beta. Before you begin, we encourage you to review a few known issues for the iPhone and Windows Mobile devices. Also, please keep in mind that Google Sync will replace all existing contacts and calendar information on your phone, so make sure to back up any important data before you get started. You can find out more information on backing up your data in the Help Center.

To try Sync, visit m.google.com/sync, and check out our video tour below.

Announced by Marcus Foster, Product Manager, Google Mobile

Introducing Measurement Lab

2009-02-01T18:47:00.000-08:00

When an Internet application doesn't work as expected or your connection seems flaky, how can you tell whether there is a problem caused by your broadband ISP, the application, your PC, or something else? It can be difficult for experts, let alone average Internet users, to address this sort of question today.

Last year we asked a small group of academics about ways to advance network research and provide users with tools to test their broadband connections. Today Google, the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, and academic researchers are taking the wraps off of Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an open platform that researchers can use to deploy Internet measurement tools.

Researchers are already developing tools that allow users to, among other things, measure the speed of their connection, run diagnostics, and attempt to discern if their ISP is blocking or throttling particular applications. These tools generate and send some data back-and-forth between the user's computer and a server elsewhere on the Internet. Unfortunately, researchers lack widely-distributed servers with ample connectivity. This poses a barrier to the accuracy and scalability of these tools. Researchers also have trouble sharing data with one another.

M-Lab aims to address these problems. Over the course of early 2009, Google will provide researchers with 36 servers in 12 locations in the U.S. and Europe. All data collected via M-Lab will be made publicly available for other researchers to build on. M-Lab is intended to be a truly community-based effort, and we welcome the support of other companies, institutions, researchers, and users that want to provide servers, tools, or other resources that can help the platform flourish.

Today, M-Lab is at the beginning of its development. To start, three tools running on servers near Google's headquarters are available to help users attempt to diagnose common problems that might impair their broadband speed, as well as determine whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled by their ISPs. These tools were created by the individual researchers who helped found M-Lab. By running these tools, users will get information about their connection and provide researchers with valuable aggregate data. Like M-Lab itself these tools are still in development, and they will only support a limited number of simultaneous users at this initial stage.

At Google, we care deeply about sustaining the Internet as an open platform for consumer choice and innovation. No matter your views on net neutrality and ISP network management practices, everyone can agree that Internet users deserve to be well-informed about what they're getting when they sign up for broadband, and good data is the bedrock of sound policy. Transparency has always been crucial to the success of the Internet, and, by advancing network research in this area, M-Lab aims to help sustain a healthy, innovative Internet.

You can learn more at the M-Lab website. If you're a researcher who'd like to deploy a tool, or a company or institution that is interested in providing technical resources, we invite you to get involved.

Announced by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist, and Stephen Stuart, Principal Engineer

Talking AdSense optimization in Google Ad Manager

2009-01-23T18:37:00.000-08:00

It can be tough to sell advertising in today's economy. It can be even tougher to figure out how to maximize revenue for each ad impression. Google Ad Manager, our hosted ad serving and management solution for publishers with small direct sales teams, was built to address these issues. Ad Manager helps publishers maximize the value of their ad impressions while reducing ad serving costs.

We enlisted the help of Nandu Ramani, Engineering Lead on Ad Manager, to talk about one of Ad Manager's features that helps publishers maximize the value of their ad impressions: AdSense price optimization.

What is the AdSense price optimization feature in Ad Manager?

Many publishers don't sell all of their ad inventory. In these situations, publishers might not serve any ads or might serve less valuable house ads, therefore losing potential earnings. The AdSense price optimization feature in Ad Manager provides an automated solution so publishers will always have an ad to serve in an undersold situation.

We also wanted to make sure that when a publisher runs multiple ad networks they are always showing the most valuable ads. For certain individual impressions, AdSense can provide the highest paying ad. When that's the case, an AdSense ad shows. When that's not the case, an ad from the highest paying alternative network will be shown.

How does the price optimization feature work?

In order for AdSense to compete against other ad networks, a publisher must manually enter a CPM for each configured network. We use the CPM entered to determine in real time, on a per impression basis, whether or not an AdSense ad will pay a publisher more. If the AdSense eCPM is greater than the CPM value entered for competing networks, then an AdSense ad will be shown. Additionally, AdSense will never compete with a publisher's directly-sold inventory. To enable the price optimization feature, all a publisher has to do is check a box when setting up inventory.

As a publisher, how much will I earn using AdSense price optimization?

It's hard to predict; the best way to find out is to opt your ad slots into AdSense price optimization and see how AdSense performs for you. With AdSense price optimization, Google will always serve the highest paying AdSense ad available, and will never lower the price of the winning ad, or reduce your earnings from it.

When should I use the AdSense price optimization feature?

We suggest you opt all of your ad slots into AdSense price optimization. AdSense ads will only appear if they're able to pay you more than the alternatives, so there's no risk of losing revenue.

We also recommend that you opt your premium placements into placement targeting so AdWords advertisers may specifically choose to bid for space on your website.

Sounds good. How do I get started?

If you already have an Ad Manager account, go into the inventory tab in your account. For each ad slot where you want to enable AdSense price optimization, click on the name of the ad slot, check the 'Maximize revenue of unsold and remnant inventory with AdSense' checkbox, and click 'Save.'

If you don't already have an account, get started today at http://www.google.com/admanager. Then, when you're setting up your inventory, make sure to opt all of your ad slots into AdSense price optimization.

For more information about AdSense in Ad Manager, check out the following video.

Announced by Stephen Kliff - Google Ad Manager Team

New Free TV Ad Creation Solution

2009-01-15T17:40:00.000-08:00

Now it's easier and more affordable to advertise your business on national television and reach new customers from within your AdWords account.

Google TV Ads has partnered with SpotMixer to bring advertisers a new, free ad creation service. This means you can create your own TV commercial from a library of free images, audio and video content, or your own uploaded content. Simply access this service from the Submit Ad page when creating your Google TV Ads campaign.

To learn more and watch a demo video, check out the blog post on the Traditional Media Blog.

Announced by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

Network effects: Introducing the Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program

2009-01-14T18:16:00.000-08:00

Just under two years ago we launched Google Apps for businesses, offering a set of of products that enable secure and cost-effective applications in the cloud. Fast-forward to today and our expanded Google Apps suite is used by more than 1 million businesses, with 3,000 new companies signing up each day.

How'd we get here? Through constant innovation (100 new features and counting), growing enthusiasm for cloud computing, and a partner network that provides our customers with complementary products, training, and integration.

Given this strong demand, we believe there's a great opportunity to do even more by helping IT solution providers grow their business opportunities around cloud computing. As we got our sea legs, we started slowly with a core group of partners who've been key trusted advisers in customer deployments, such as at Genentech and Hamilton Beach. We're now expanding this ecosystem to help more IT professionals build cloud computing expertise. Today we're excited to announce the Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program. With this release, solution providers globally can take advantage of tools that enable bundling of sales, customization and support for Google Apps Premier Edition for customers of all sizes.

We've adapted this program to complement resellers' current business models. Authorized Resellers have the flexibility to combine their existing services with Google Apps. With cloud-based Google Apps there is no new hardware or software to maintain. The Authorized Reseller program benefits include:

owning the customer relationship and billing structure
providing consulting, service management and end-user support
receiving a recurring discount on the annual Google Apps licensing fee
receiving marketing, sales and technical training from Google

We've been fine-tuning the program for the past few months, working with more than 50 pilot resellers to make sure it's a good fit with our partners' needs. We're excited about the new opportunities that cloud computing is creating for IT solution providers, and we encourage you to visit our program site to learn more about the program and apply.

Announced by Paul Slakey, Director of Enterprise Channels

Asking Dave Taylor about AdSense

2009-01-13T18:21:00.000-08:00

AskDaveTaylor.com offers tech support Q&A on subjects ranging from mp3 players to Linux to AdSense. We recently chatted with founder Dave Taylor about his site and his AdSense experience.

Inside AdSense: Where did the idea for your 'Ask Dave Taylor' site come from?

Dave Taylor: There's a great backstory, actually. I've written twenty different books on various business and technical topics, including Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours and Creating Cool Web Sites. Each time I'd publish, I would be sure to include my email address and other contact information. Problem was, people would send me email with questions. Lots of email with questions.

Over time I found myself answering the same questions again and again and realized that there had to be a better way for readers to search through an archive of already answered questions. I tried an online discussion forum, but it didn't really work very well (though it did give me an excuse to write my own bbs system from scratch, but that's another story!).

Then early in 2003 this "weblog" thing started to gain a bit of traction. When I first saw how it was built upon the concept of an author writing entries and others being able to add their comments, I realized that it could be ideal for my needs.

IA: Why did you join the AdSense program?

DT: As a businessperson, I had always viewed my website as a cost center. I mean, you had to pay for hosting, you had to pay for graphic design, you had to pay for Internet connectivity, etc. That was just my mindset. It was a marketing expense and its purpose was lead generation for my consulting and book sales.

In mid-2003 my friend told me about this "AdSense thing" and said that he'd been experimenting with it and making some money. So I finally decided that I'd try putting some adverts on my site (I'd been on the Web since 1996 but never had any adverts on my sites until that point). That first month I made more than I expected by simply adding the AdSense adverts to my pages and was surprised as heck. Then it started to grow...

That's when it hit me, that my website was becoming a profit center for my business, not a cost center. I began to pay more attention to the site and published new content on a more regular basis. Within a few months I was earning enough to pay my mortgage, and today my website, and specifically Google AdSense, is a primary revenue stream for my entire company.

IA: Can you talk a little about your experience with optimizing your ads?

Once I began working with AdSense in earnest, I began to wonder how ad placement, size, color, and design would affect earnings, and how to balance my desire to offer a splendid user experience with the need to simultaneously maximize revenue.

Enter A/B testing. I read and talked with many AdSense publishers, tried what they suggested and what had worked for them, fiddled with my own ideas, and generally tried every variation I could imagine to see if I could improve the click-through-rate of my ad blocks. The greatest boosts I saw in clickthrough rate were when I moved the advert into the middle of my articles, when I made sure it had the same color background as the material around it, and when there wasn't a solid border or other visual element to make the ad stand out from the surrounding content.

Truth be told, I've also paid close attention to the sites profiled on the AdSense blog, looking at how they integrated ads into their own design and trying to emulate their successful techniques on my own site.

IA: Glad to hear you used the blog! Any other optimization tips for our readers?

Focus on generating really good content that meets real user needs.
Design your blog so that there are minimal distractions for the user.
Wrap your blog entry around the Google ad unit and put the ads where users will see them, though make sure you have them visually distinct from your content: trying to trick readers into clicking on ads is a definite no-no and anti-reader too.

IA: Thanks for the interview, Dave, and good luck with your site!

Do you also have an AdSense success story to share? Let us know.

Announced by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Powering a Google search

2009-01-12T18:10:00.000-08:00

Not long ago, answering a query meant traveling to the reference desk of your local library. Today, search engines enable us to access immense quantities of useful information in an instant, without leaving home. Tools like email, online books and photos, and video chat all increase productivity while decreasing our reliance on car trips, pulp and paper.

But as computers become a bigger part of more people's lives, information technology consumes an increasing amount of energy, and Google takes this impact seriously. That's why we have designed and built the most energy efficient data centers in the world, which means the energy used per Google search is minimal. In fact, in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than Google uses to answer your query.

Recently, though, others have used much higher estimates, claiming that a typical search uses "half the energy as boiling a kettle of water" and produces 7 grams of CO2. We thought it would be helpful to explain why this number is *many* times too high. Google is fast — a typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds. Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.

In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. The current EU standard for tailpipe emissions calls for 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven, but most cars don't reach that level yet. Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.

We've made great strides to reduce the energy used by our data centers, but we still want clean and affordable sources of electricity for the power that we do use. In 2008 our philanthropic arm, Google.org, invested $45 million in breakthrough clean energy technologies. And last summer, as part of our Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative (RE), we created an internal engineering group dedicated to exploring clean energy.

We're also working with other members of the IT community to improve efficiency on a broader scale. In 2007 we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a group which champions more efficient computing. This non-profit consortium is committed to cutting the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 — reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year. That's a lot of kettles of tea.

Update on 1/12 @ 4 PM: Harvard professor Alex Wissner-Gross provided new details on his energy research, in a TechNewsWorld article.

Announced by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations

Google's new favicon

2009-01-11T19:05:00.000-08:00

Back in June, we rolled out a new favicon — the small icon that greets you when you access Google on your URL bar or your bookmarks list — and we encouraged our users to submit their ideas for this important piece of Google branding. We were impressed by the volume of submissions we received, and today we are happy to introduce a new Google favicon inspired by those submissions by our users. While the final icon is a reinterpretation of one contest submission, it draws on design elements and ideas from many of them.

Google's new favicon

André Resende, a computer science undergraduate student at the University of Campinas in Brazil, submitted the design that inspired our new favicon. His placement of a white 'g' on a color-blocked background was highly recognizable and attractive, while seeming to capture the essence of Google.

by André Resende

Although we changed the color layout slightly and moved the 'g' off center, his submission formed the basis for our new design.

Incorporating all four of Google's colors (red, yellow, green, and blue) into the four corners of the favicon was a theme we liked in many submissions. We also saw this idea in the designs submitted by Hadi Onur Demirsoy, Lucian E. Marin, and Yusuf Sevgen (pictured below).

by Hadi Onur Demirsoy

by Lucian E. Marin

by Yusuf Sevgen

We hope you like the new favicon, which nicely integrates all of our original criteria: distinctive in shape, noticeable, colorful, timeless, and scalable to other sizes.

While I'm sure we will update it again, we also hope our new favicon inspired by Andre is a warm, colorful beacon to Google on your browser tabs and bookmarks. A big thank you to Andre, Hadi, Lucian, and Yusuf, as well as all of the other people who helped us define our new look in a uniquely user-driven way!

Announced by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience, and Micheal Lopez, Web Design Lead

Our Inside AdSense resolution

2009-01-08T18:12:00.000-08:00

Here on the AdSense blog, we usually kick off each new year with a list of suggested AdSense resolutions for publishers. Although we still think using more 300x250 medium rectangles and setting up ad placements make great goals for the year, we'd like to change things up this time and share our resolutions with you.

In 2009, we resolve to continue improving the blog based on your needs and suggestions. We heard positive feedback and saw increases in readership last year in response to our themed campaigns, videos, and easier navigation to important posts. Beyond that, we want to continue looking for ways to ensure that this blog is a useful resource for you, whether you're looking for new feature releases or oldie-but-goodie optimization tips.

We also resolve to bring you more information from our team in new ways. In the new year, you'll hear more from the Product Managers who develop the AdSense features you use, and specialists on the AdSense team who will share their expertise with you. We've heard from many publishers that they want clearer, more transparent communication from our team, and we resolve to provide as much information as we can to address your questions and concerns.

Do you have suggestions for improving the blog, or types of content you'd like to see more of? We're all ears, so please feel free to leave us a comment below. It's a brand new year, and we're ready to get started!

Announced by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Google at Macworld

2009-01-07T18:47:00.000-08:00

After months of anticipation, Macworld 2009 is finally here. Throughout the four days of the expo (from now until Jan. 9), more than 100 Googlers from several product teams will be available to demonstrate Google software for the Mac and the iPhone.

Picasa for Mac made its debut yesterday, and you can follow along on the Google Mac Blog for more details on what we have in store for the rest of the week.

If you're going to Macworld, we invite you to stop by. And for those of you who can't make it, many of the demos are available via video at google.com/macworld.

Announced by Jason Toff, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Introducing Picasa for Mac (at Macworld!)

2009-01-05T18:11:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I find it hard to describe Picasa without sounding like a late-night infomercial for a multi-bladed thingamabob: "It's a photo organizer! A photo editor! A web-savvy photo sharing and management system in just one tiny package!"

We try hard to avoid hyperbole around here, but it's true that Picasa software, working together with Picasa Web Albums, can help with nearly every aspect of owning and operating a digital camera. And because many of us take pictures in order to share them, we try to make sure Picasa does a great job of getting your favorite photos online, where friends and family can enjoy them too. In Picasa 3, that means powerful new features like automatically syncing changes between the photos on your computer and what you're sharing online, useful privacy controls integrated into the software on your PC, easier notifications, and more.

And today, we're releasing Picasa for Mac. While we've previously offered both a standalone Picasa Web Albums uploader and an iPhoto plugin for Mac users, Picasa for Mac finally brings all of the advanced sharing and sync features of Picasa to the millions of Mac OS X users who use Picasa Web Albums. Not to mention the "it-slices-and-dices" feature list that covers everything from color balance to collages.

Picasa for Mac looks and works much like Picasa on other platforms, and offers trademark Picasa features — such as non-destructive editing, and the ability to keep track of photos anywhere on your hard drive, then automatically account for new images as you add them.

Right now, Picasa for Mac is still in Google Labs, but we very much wanted to get an early version out to folks attending Macworld (you can learn more about this beta release at the Google Photos blog). To run Picasa, you'll need an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.4 and above. We hope you'll give it a spin, and give us your feedback in person — members of the Picasa engineering team will be conducting demos at Google's Macworld booth all week (you can also check out the video tour below).

Announced by Susanna Leng, Software Engineer

Adsense Year in review: 2008

2009-01-04T19:29:00.000-08:00

As 2008 winds down, we'd like to follow tradition and close out the year with a look back at a few of the biggest happenings in AdSense.

In 2008, we introduced new features like AdSense for feeds and an improved version of AdSense for search to help you generate additional forms of revenue. We brought Google Ad Manager out of beta to help publishers with smaller direct sales teams more efficiently sell, schedule, and deliver their ad inventory. At the same time, we worked towards providing more information within AdSense accounts. In April, we enabled the Ad Review Center in all accounts to help you review ads placement-targeted to your sites. And in response to requests for more insight into your reports, we launched link unit reporting and began inviting publishers to link their AdSense accounts with Analytics.

Internationally, we launched AdSense for content in Thai and also expanded Western Union payments to a number of new countries such as Egypt, Taiwan, and Panama. To help more publishers find answers to their questions, we launched AdSense Help Forums in Hebrew, Czech, and Slovak.

On the English Help Forum, we celebrated our 50,000th member and then unveiled a new platform with additional capabilities. Now, forum participants can vote on the best answer to their questions, subscribe to individual discussions, and receive replies to their threads via email.

In news closest to home here on the blog, the Inside AdSense family continued to grow with the launch of blogs in Russian and Traditional Chinese. With your support, our 13 global AdSense blogs received 3.8 million pageviews from 2.4 million visits this year. Through our blogs, we brought you a Newbie Fridays series, 'Optimisation Essentials' videos from our Australian team, and began distributing AdSense stickers. Check out the sticker requests, postcards, and notes we received in the photo on the right :)

Last but not least, the 2008 Reader's Choice Award for this year's most visited post goes to our April Fool's joke, 'Introducing AdSense for conversations'. Co-author Julie Beckmann had this to say: "A lot of hard work went into omega testing the product for this post. While I found the hat fit snugly, I was disappointed to learn the effect my Orange County upbringing had on my chats -- 17 'like's' sprinkled into a two-minute conversation? My chats aren't fit to be placement-targeted."

Thanks for helping to contribute to an eventful 2008 -- we're looking forward to an even more exciting 2009. Happy New Year!

Announced by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Google blogging in 2008

2009-01-01T19:11:00.000-08:00

Every year right about now we round up our blogging activity across Google. Ready? Here goes.

This is our 368th post of the year on the main Google blog, which is 23% more than in 2007. In addition to more posts, we are thrilled to know that we have many more readers now — 78% more, to be exact. The number of unique visitors jumped from 6,738,830 last year to more than 12 million (12,000,723) in 2008. And readers are coming from all over: the UK, Canada, India, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan and beyond. The top non-Google referrers are Yahoo, Digg, Reddit, Lifehacker and Slashdot.

We posted quite a bit about new products (10) and new product features (56), but nothing caused as much excitement as our earlier-than-planned unveiling of Google Chrome. This post alone had 1,735,093 unique visitors and generated 12% of our total-year pageviews on the blog! There was also the much-anticipated announcement of the first Android-powered phone. And people enjoyed reading about our design philosophies. Who knew a little change to a favicon would generate such interest?

But it wasn't all just product news; there was much else to cover in 2008. To mark Google's 10th birthday, we took a moment to reflect on the enormous impact the Internet has had on people's lives since our founding. Some of our in-house experts shared their thoughts on how various technologies will evolve in the next 10 years.

Like many of you, we were on the edge of seats watching all of the U.S. election action. We posted 27 times about political subjects, providing information about voting tools, how the political process works, and what was top of mind on Election Day. It's clear that technology will be playing an even bigger role in politics in years to come.

Of course, we had some fun too: We kept our long-standing April Fools' Day tradition going with the announcement of Project Virgle; we covered new ways to get around the Googleplex and the masterminding of a giant Ferris wheel; and we raised our glass to a couple who got married with Google.

And the Google blog network keeps on growing: 44 new blogs launched this year, for a total of 127 active company blogs. A few highlights: eight new developer blogs (the Open Source blog is shining star, with 370,000 unique visitors since its start in February), and 22 new ads-related blogs, nearly half of which are in languages other than English (there are AdSense blogs in Traditional Chinese and Russian; and AdWords blogs in Danish, German, Turkish, French, Russian, Korean, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Spanish). There's even an Analytics blog in French. And we also welcomed three new regional blogs, for India, Africa, and the Ukraine. Sharing information with people wherever they are in whatever language they speak is a priority for us, and each of these new blogs helps us get a little bit closer to this goal. If the total number of Google blogs makes your head spin, don't worry. We've developed a new blog directory and gadget to help you more easily track news and updates from us.

We're looking forward to another robust year of keeping you informed of all the goings-on at Google. In the meantime, we wish you and yours a very happy New Year.

Announced by Susan Straccia, Google Blog Team

(Ad)Word of the Day: Optimization

2008-12-30T18:59:00.000-08:00

Seasoned AdWords users know that to have successful campaigns you need to do more than simply set them up and let them run. To get the most out of your campaigns, you should consider optimization, today's (Ad)Word of the Day.

According to the AdWords Glossary, optimization is the process of modifying your ad campaigns to improve the quality and performance of your AdWords ads. This often involves changing the contents and settings of your campaigns and ad groups and editing your keyword lists and landing pages.

Optimization can be as simple as adding new keywords relevant to your campaign, or can be as involved as adjusting your CPC bids and rewriting your ad text. By optimizing your campaigns to improve your keyword Quality Scores, you can help lower your ad's costs without losing your position on a search results page.

If you'd like to learn more about optimization, here's a guide from our AdWords Help Center.

Announced by Christian Yee, Inside AdWords crew

Adwords Top 10 of 2008

2008-12-24T18:30:00.000-08:00

2008 is coming to a close, and we want to leave you with our favorite posts for 2008. The posts were chosen based on FrankRank, and represent the team's favorites over the last year.

Introducing Google Ad Planner
There was a ton of interest in the tool, and the post announcing it was the most read post here on Inside AdWords for the whole year.
Improvements to Ads Quality
This year, we made two big changes to how we calculate Quality Score and rank ads. This post explained the new changes in detail.
Build your own display ads in minutes
We liked this post as it showed off a new tool that helps you broaden your advertising campaigns easily.
Keyword tool updated with search volume
A theme for this year's top posts is providing our advertisers with more information to make their advertising decisions. The keyword tool updates definitely fit in with this theme.
Announcing Google Insights for Search
Like the keyword tool, Insights for Search is another useful tool for your business.
Tie: New ways to look at Search & Content Network statistics and Separate metrics for Google and search partners now available
Both these posts announced improvements to AdWords reporting that had been heavily requested by advertisers.
New features in Website Optimizer
The new features addressed some of the top requests for Website Optimizer.
Use keywords and placements together on the content network
This new feature gave advertisers better control over their advertising on the content network.
Groundhogs, Seasonality, and Trends
A fun post looking at how you could use Google Trends to plan your campaigns around seasonal traffic patterns.
Announcing the Search-based Keyword Tool
Another tool we released this year. The Search-based Keyword Tool helps you locate missed opportunities for advertising campaigns.

That's it for our top 10 for this year. We'll be off celebrating the holidays for the next two weeks, so you won't see any posts from us. We'll be back here blogging in January. Have a great holiday!

Announced by Trevor Claiborne, Inside AdWords crew

Adsense Light up your site

2008-12-23T18:17:00.000-08:00

We all know how it feels to find the perfect gift. After scouring stores far and wide, suddenly your hunt is over: the stars have aligned to bring you just what you're looking for -- and not a moment too soon. It's a bit the same way when a search brings you to just the right site. But what if your site's just the right site, and users can't find it?

We're happy to let you know that you don't need divine forces to play a role in the findability of your site. Nope -- you can help make sure that your site turns up just when it should by taking advantage of these tips from our Search Quality Team.

Not sure if all your pages are being seen by Google? Search for your site's address after the command "site", like [site:example.com]. When you see your pages in the results, check your snippet content and page titles. Include information that matches the topic of a particular page. If anything is missing or you want more details, you can also use the Content Analysis tool in Webmaster Tools.
If you upload new pages or topics faster than Google crawls your site, make sure to submit a Google Sitemap and include a refresh rate.
Label your images appropriately. Users searching in Google Image Search will more easily find the image on your site. Don't miss out on potential traffic because of [001.jpg] instead of [NintendoWii.jpg]. Image Search is one of the largest search properties out there, so you should take advantage of it.
Manage your SiteLinks. Your most valuable links may not be the ones that Google chooses as SiteLinks, so remember you can remove any that you don't think users will find useful.
Check for errors and keyword traffic in Webmaster Tools. See our diagnostics checklist.
Serve accurate HTTP status codes. If you've retired a page permanently, serve a 404. If you've simply relocated it, serve a 301. The more we know about your old pages, the faster we will find the next best page on your site for a given query.
Users and search engines like organic content. Make some of your own!
Read our recently released SEO Starter Guide.
Watch our Tutorials for Webmasters.
Find out what information Google has about your website in Webmaster Tools.
Get the latest updates from the Webmaster Central Blog.
Find answers to your questions in our Webmaster Help Center, or ask your questions in the Webmaster Help Group.

Whether it be the perfect gift, the perfect site, or the perfect cup of cocoa on a cold winter's night, we hope all your searches are fruitful this holiday season.

Announced by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support

Black Googlers Network: building community

2008-12-22T18:38:00.000-08:00

We believe great ideas can come from anywhere and everyone. And we aspire to be an organization that reflects global diversity, because we know that a world's worth of perspectives, ideas and cultures leads to the creation of better products and services. We have more than a dozen employee-driven resource groups, from Gayglers to GWE (Google Women Engineers), that actively participate around the world in building community and driving policy at Google. This is the next post in our Interface series, which takes a look at valuing people's similarities and differences in the workplace. For more information on how Google fosters an inclusive work environment, visit Life at Google on our Jobs site. – Ed.

It's been a busy few months for the Black Googlers Network (BGN). One of our group's core goals is to build a community that keeps us connected, facilitates the sharing of ideas, and participates in community outreach. We sponsored a variety of events this fall across many of our offices, giving us the opportunity to give back and have some fun while doing it.

To kick things off, a group of us from the Mountain View, New York, Ann Arbor, Chicago and Atlanta offices, to name a few, rolled up our sleeves for our first annual service trip. We headed to New Orleans in September to aid in the Hurricane Katrina rebuilding efforts. Undeterred by Hurricane Gustav, which unexpectedly hit the coast the week before we arrived, we managed to make some adjustments to flights and itineraries and were some of the first volunteers back into the city.

We partnered with the St. Bernard Project, learning everything from how to lay flooring to installing drywall as we worked on three homes. Additionally, we joined a strategy session with The Idea Village, helping them kick off their newest initiative, the 504ward Project. The opportunity to serve the community in such a meaningful way while getting to know BGN members was unique. We each put our minds, bodies, and souls into the city and the experience.

Next, BGN participated in the United Negro College Fund's annual Walk-a-thon in Oakland, CA. Our Google-UNCF partnership also includes an annual scholarship for college students pursing a degree in engineering or computer science, and we're continuing to explore different ways to support and encourage underrepresented students.

This month, we're coming together in many of our offices for the holidays, giving ourselves a chance to catch up and take stock of the work we've done over the past year. Not to be slowed down for too long, though, as we will soon begin the exciting process of planning our new initiatives for 2009.

Announced by Alexa Bush, University Programs Team

New search-by-style options for Google Image Search

2008-12-21T17:57:00.000-08:00

Many of us use Google Image Search to find imagery of people, clip art for presentations, diagrams for reports, and of course symbols and patterns for artistic inspiration. Unfortunately, searching for the perfect image can be challenging if the search results match the meaning of your query but aren't in a style that's useful to you. So some time ago we launched face search, which lets you limit your search results to only images containing faces (see a search without and with this option). More recently we also rolled out photo search, which limits results to images that contain photographic elements, ignoring many cartoons and drawings which may not be useful to you (see a search without and with this option).

Today we're pleased to extend this capability to clip art and line drawings. To see the effect of these new options, let's take a look at the first few results for "Christmas," one of our most popular queries on Image Search right now.

Photo content

Clip art

Line drawing

All of these options can be selected from the "Any content" drop down in the blue title bar on any search results page, or by selecting one of the "Content types" on the Advanced Image Search page. The good news: no extra typing! In all these examples our query remained exactly the same, we just restricted our results to different visual styles. So whether you're interested holiday wreaths, Celtic patterns, or office clip art, it just became a lot easier to find the images you're looking for.

Announced by Sean O'Malley, Software Engineer, Google Image Search

AdWords Editor 7.0 for Windows and Mac

2008-12-18T18:05:00.000-08:00

This week, we released version 7.0 of AdWords Editor for Windows and Mac. The new version includes the long-awaited first page bid estimates and keyword Quality Score, along with several updates to the Keyword Opportunities tool. Version 7.0 also provides the option to enable usage tracking, which lets Google collect anonymous statistics to help us improve AdWords Editor. Learn more about these and other new features in the release notes.

If you're not already using AdWords Editor, you can visit our website and click 'Download AdWords Editor' to get started. If you're an existing user, you'll see a prompt to upgrade to version 7.0 the next time you run the application.

Important: Existing AdWords Editor users will need to download their accounts again after upgrading to version 7.0. We've discovered an issue with the automatic upgrade feature (the 'Backup then Update' option in the upgrade prompt), so please refer to these special instructions to save comments and uposted changes when you upgrade.

If you'd like to wait to upgrade, you can click 'Don't Update' in the automatic update prompt.

To learn more about the benefits of using AdWords Editor to manage your ad campaigns offline, please refer to these frequently asked questions. Also, comprehensive instructions and tips are available in our Help Center.

Announced by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

Blog gadget 2.0 from Google

2008-12-17T18:52:00.000-08:00

Back in September we introduced an iGoogle gadget that makes it possible to read recent posts from all of our corporate blogs, right on your dashboard. With the help of developer Ben Lisbakken, we're ready to roll out the next version of the gadget, which translates posts into 34 languages. Using Google Translate, the gadget gives people all over the world access to posts they might otherwise be unable to read. The default setting translates posts into the language in which your browser is set, but you can also choose from any of our supported languages by going into the "Edit" setting (found in the "Menu" arrow in the right-hand corner). If you want to learn more about Google in Latin America or AdWords in Russia, for example, but haven't had the chance to learn Spanish or Russian, give the gadget a spin. While machine translation is not exact, and we're constantly working to improve the quality, hopefully this new feature lets you get the gist of the post.

Here's a list of the supported languages:
Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

Just choose the category of blogs you would like to read and click the "Translate" button.

The gadget will translate the posts and give you the option to "Revert" back to the original language. And to read the entire blog in translation, just click on the blog title beneath the post.

We hope you have fun exploring the entire Google blogosphere.

Announced by Jordan Newman, Google Blog Team

Google Adsense Optimize

2008-12-16T18:24:00.000-08:00

It's Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it readily available to all; as a web publisher, one of your goals may also be to make sure your content is readily available to all. We've recently taken steps to help you grow your site's traffic: we updated our Submit Your Content site with more information about distributing your content through Google products such as Web Search, Maps, YouTube, and iGoogle. In addition, we launched our Content Central blog, featuring tips and information from Googlers who work on different products. The goal of both of these resources is to help you grow your site's visitors by taking advantage of promotion opportunities in new Google mediums.

If you're just getting started with these resources, we recommend visiting the yellow getting started box in the upper right hand corner of the Submit Your Content homepage. Here, we've listed the three steps we recommend all content partners take to begin sharing their content. Alternatively, check out the industry categories where we'll walk you through the types of content you may have, and show you where that content is visible across various Google services.

We've also enabled comments on the Content Central blog, so feel free to visit the blog to suggest topics for future posts or leave your feedback. If you've already visited the Submit Your Content site, you may know all about the wonders of RSS, so be sure to subscribe to the Content Central blog's feed to receive the latest posts when they're published. Or, enter your email address in the right-hand sidebar to subscribe by email.

Announced by Steffanie Johnson - Content Partnerships Team